It’s a Facebook world, friends. And I mean “friends” in that ever-expanding sense of the word, where intimate requests are issued and processed with digital efficiency. I’m not sure if playwright Sarah Ruhl had social media in mind when she penned In the Next Room or the vibrator play, which opened Friday at the Milwaukee Rep. But it certainly was on my mind as I watched her characters deal with the latest technology of their age.
Ruhl’s play isn’t about tweets and status updates. Instead, she takes us back to the bustled propriety of the Victorian age, when universal home electricity was still a gleam in Thomas Edison’s eye and Science was a force to be reckoned with.
At least it is to Doctor Givings (Grant Goodman), who likes to trade stories at the club about the latest marvels of Edison’s invention, mostly involving the electrocution of large mammals. His electrophilia is understandable. His house and office is wired and aglow. It has given his practice a healthy jolt of interest among husbands who feel their wives are suffering from hysteria, that classic 19th century women’s “malady” thought to be caused by a buildup of fluids in the uterus. The treatment, of course, involves inducing a “paroxysm” in the woman through “intimate massage,” after which followed a sleepy smile and a craving for a cigarette. The invention of the vibrator revolutionized the hysteria racket.
Ruhl’s play mines the absurdity of the Old Ways for some heady comedy—and sometimes uncomfortable giggles. The women receive their “treatment” in the doctor’s office (the “Next Room” of the play’s title), stripping down to their bloomers and lying under a white sheet (the undoing of costume designer Lorraine Venberg’s petticoats and corsets speaks volumes about the era’s attitudes). Once he finds the sweet spot under the sheet, Givings stands like a Grenadier at Buckingham Palace until the treatment is finished. Afterward, he informs the panting patient that the treatment was a success, and heads off to the club.
But Ruhl isn’t only interested in chuckling at our misguided past. Laura Gordon’s breezy and well-detailed direction allows the play to go down easy, but still highlights the play’s serious intentions.
Disconnections abound in Ruhl’s world: between husband and wife, mother and child, between married couples and potential lovers. They are embodied most powerfully by Givings’s wife, Catherine, brilliantly played by Cora Vander Broek. Catherine craves connections beyond her station, and flits around like Nora in her dollhouse, trying to engage everyone she meets. She’s drawn to a free-wheeling artist, whose tales of Italian life and art make her swoon. She befriends a patient, Sabrina Daldry (Cassandra Bissell) and endures her husband’s flirtations (or doesn’t recognize them, as they are mostly hilariously charged but straight-faced double entendres). Her own husband, of course, is a Man of Science, and above the paltry passions and emotions of women.
Catherine perseveres, however, in this battle of woman vs. machine. And her triumph at the end of the play is a beautiful testament to the power of intimate, human connection, victorious over science, morality, propriety and all of those social strictures that supposedly make life less messy.
Photo by Alan Simons
Daddy Long Legs
There’s an equally captivating spirit at the heart of the Skylight Music Theatre’s Daddy Long Legs. Based on a 1912 epistolary novel by Jean Webster, it’s the story of young woman who is rescued from her job at an orphanage (where she herself grew up) and sent to a university courtesy of an anonymous benefactor. He is Jervis Pendleton, slightly damaged and estranged from his wealthy New York family. In return for his generosity, he asks that she write him a monthly letter describing her life and studies. He, however, will never return her notes, and is to remain unknown. She is Jerusha Abbott, smart, feisty, curious and utterly charming. And of course, she’s a bit too fascinating to resist.
Playwright John Caird and composer Paul Gordon arrange the story into a sort of dramatic song cycle that charts the shifting relationship between the two. She grows and matures before our eyes. And he gradually reveals himself to the audience, and—in backhanded ways—to Jerusha.
This is a smooth and accomplished production that has already played several U.S. theaters and garnered several awards. Megan McGinnis and Rob Hancock are an impressive pair that bring a gentle sophistication to a gently sophisticated show, but Daddy Long Legs belongs to McGinnis, a singer who brings a natural ease and lyricism to the music, and is a completely enchanting stage presence. She holds your musical attention without resorting to flashy pyrotechnics (Hancock’s intimately scaled score, thankfully, doesn’t allow much chance for that). Even though you can probably predict how the story ends, you’re with her all the way.
Daddy Long Legs is reportedly headed for London, and possibly to New York. While it’s hard to imagine this tender and delicate show on a big Broadway stage, it deserves to be seen by everyone who believes in the power of music to spin a great story.
Photo by Mark Frohna
